“I first noticed strange things in my house when I moved in 17 years ago. It’s just a small, older bungalow not far from the harbour.

It all started with footsteps in our unfinished attic. Not long after, I would notice the light on the clock radio in my kitchen would turn on by itself. I’d switch it off using the manual switch that you had to click upwards twice before it turned on, and down twice before it could turn off… only to find it back on shortly thereafter and I was home alone.

Many times I would stand at my kitchen sink and while I was doing dishes I could hear someone call my name loudly. I would run to the next room to see who it was, yet my spouse would be sleeping or I would be home alone. Once I saw the reflection of a man in what appeared to be a farmer’s hat behind me through the reflection in the window above the sink.

Less than a year after I moved in, I witnessed one of the scariest things. The bottom drawer of our dresser came flying out across the room with such force that it broke in four pieces without explanation. To this day I still get chills thinking about it.

Our German shepherd would fiercely and endlessly bark at one corner of our living room at something only she could see.

Items often go missing for days or weeks on end. Sometimes I yell at the unseen being to bring it back and usually it reappears somewhere we’ve searched many times over before. Other times items have seemed to have been thrown across the room by nothing.

Once, my mother was visiting and she walked into the bathroom, the medicine cabinet opened and a glass bottle flew and narrowly missed her.

Another time my brother was over and he and I were speaking in the kitchen and a large old tin can that I kept on the refrigerator that was filled with change and batteries and whatnot flew at his head, he barely jumped out of the way before it could strike him.

Our cupboard doors have slammed open and shut on their own and even scared my brute of a husband.

My mother and brother who’d been sleeping at the opposite end of the house once rushed to my room because they both claimed they heard me screaming for help in the middle of the night. When in fact everyone in our home, myself included, were all sound asleep.

My brother, his girlfriend, and myself have all seen the apparition of a young boy in my house which we later discovered we would all describe the same way.

These are only a few of the tales I could tell. We’ve burned sage and said a prayer over the home but haven’t had the need to have it blessed. For the most part it is harmless, just unnerving.”

“I was never a big believer of ghosts. I always looked for a logical explanation as to what could have caused these strange things to happen. But at the end of it all there is some things I just can’t explain.

I moved into this duplex in year 2000. It was me, my common-law husband, and his nephew. I was at that time pregnant with my first child. I moved into this place knowing that a man that lived there before us just a few months prior had tried to kill himself and was found hanging in the doorway of the basement bedroom. He was sent to the hospital and revived but then later killed himself at his mother’s residence.

The owner of the duplex who lived in the other half beside us would keep telling me that the place was haunted and she would see people in her house and hear people walking down their hall at night. I kinda laughed it off. But then some strange this started to happen to us as well.

One night while we had friends over and we were playing a game of Risk, we all jumped to the sound of a loud bang that actually shook the whole house. The guys all jumped up and started checking the inside and outside of the house to see where it came from. No one found anything. We were all confused but we started to play again and 10 minutes later the same thing happened. Even the walls and dishes rattled from the loud unexplained bang.

In another occasion, me and my husband’s nephew were doing dishes when a bright blue light traveled through the kitchen. And many times at night when we were downstairs watching TV we would hear a sound that sounded like a dog running around upstairs and his nails tapping the floor as he ran.

You would also hear things rolling across the floor upstairs. Kinda sounded like a pencil rolling across the floor. It was weird because if we would go upstairs there would be nothing there.

Then I was home alone with my son who was now about 8 months old. The guys were working midnight shift and I had put my son to bed. I went downstairs to watch TV. My boy had a Fisher Price train that had a one button push remote. Push once and the train went forward, push again and it went backwards.

All of a sudden the train started going across the hardwood floor all by itself. I was the only person there. I thought maybe the remote was in the toy box hitting something, so I went and searched for it and couldn’t find it. When I turned around I noticed the remote was on the coffee table. Nothing was near it. Again the train started moving on its own. I was freaking out.

But the final straw was one night we were all sitting in the basement watching TV. All of a sudden the lights all turned off and the TV went all fuzzy. My first reaction was the power went out but then quickly realized the TV power was still on but just every channel was fuzzy. The light switch for the basement was at the top of the stairs. I went up and turned it back on because somehow it was in the off position. Then our nephew asked, “Well how did the side lamp turn off?” I said I didn’t think it was on but he was convinced that it was, so I went to touch the bulb to see if it was hot and sure enough it was. That’s when I looked down and noticed that it had been unplugged from the wall.

How does a light switch upstairs turn off and at the exact same time a lamp get unplugged and your tv lose all reception? All at the exact same time? This was enough for me. It wasn’t too long after that I had moved out.”

“3rd Avenue West main floor apartment when you first enter into the door on the left side of the house. Not the apartment in front, but the one directly behind it located at the bottom of the stairs when on the right.

When I first moved in, it was my one year old and myself living there. Everyone who visited me had experiences there and many were scared off. I knew someone who had previously lived there upstairs, but she no longer resided there when I moved in. My apartment had a door off the kitchen going to the basement which the landlord allowed me to use to hang laundry to dry on ropes.

Keys were flying off the key holders hitting my guests in the face while on their way into the washroom which was off one of the bedrooms. The lay out was kind of strange but I needed the space as I was expecting another child.

My boyfriend at the time all of a sudden took a swing with his fists in mid-air and swore something grabbed him around the neck. Nothing was visible but he said he felt it.

We later broke up so I took in a border who claimed she was often being touched or could hear voices. She moved out. Another moved in and she had experiences of being touched.

My clothes would mysteriously vanish and one time my jogging pants somehow ended up in the kitchen sink with water and soap which I discovered in the morning.

One time I came home to the fire trucks outside the house. There was a fire in my apartment and somehow a pot of spaghetti was able to get onto a burner, turned on, and caused the fire. No one was hurt but three other people witnessed me taking the left-over spaghetti and putting it away. So how did it get onto the stove and turned on by it self I will never know.

My toddler became deathly ill suddenly and nearly died while living there. Two miscarriages occurred to two different tenants in the house in the upstairs apartment. My son was in hospital for weeks with a mysterious illness nearly taking his life.

My daughter came to visit one weekend and she ended up on the living room chair. I found her there around 5:00 a.m., she claimed a man carried her to the chair. There was no man.

When my second child was born he screamed day and night. No doctors could figure out why. My friends who were Native brought their child over who was a seer. They told me if anything was in that apartment they would know by her actions. She cried all night in fear, they claimed she could see evil spirits.

The lights would always flicker on and off and the landlord would accuse me of always leaving the basement lights on when I had not even been in the basement. I wasn’t even home that day.

I got fed up with this place. There was a mail slot on my wooden front door where the mailman would shoot the mail in to me. In the middle of the night I would hear three knocks on my door around 3:00 a.m. and no one would answer when I called out to see who was there. Only the mail slot would move up as if someone where placing mail into it.

I decided to send both my boys to stay with their grandmothers for a bit. Both boys’ health improved, so I decided to leave there and move away.

Years later while on Facebook I came across the lady who I once met years earlier who lived in that house in the apartment directly above me before I moved in. I asked her did anything ever happen while she lived there. She said yes there was an old man who often would be standing at the foot of her bed when she woke up, and things were often moved around and out of place.

I believe that house tried to kill my babies because when the doctors examined them both babies were sick and anemic, almost to the point of heart failure and for no apparent reason. So we decided to have my daughter examined as well cause she had been visiting on weekends. And she too, the same thing — iron deficiency.”

“I had just moved into a rental cottage with my husband and two small children temporarily while we looked for a house to purchase in the area. The furnished cottage was set on the side of a hill. It was small and somewhat run down but we didn’t mind since we didn’t anticipate being there long.

I always got a strange feeling in the lower level but the children didn’t seem to mind. Their bedroom was where they could play and make as much noise as they wanted.

The unexplained happenings started as soon as we moved into the cottage, with a particular picture in the bedroom falling off the wall on a regular basis. I tried to knock it off the wall by slamming the door, banging on the wall, etc. but to no avail.

One warm summer evening I heard footsteps, hurried and heavy, ascend the stairs leading up to the deck making the house shake. Thinking that my husband was home early with his visiting brother, I uncapped a couple of cold beverages and went to greet them and found nothing. No one was there and there was nowhere for anyone to go if they were. Weird. It kind of freaked me out a little but I shrugged it off.

Only when it happened again, around the same time that I realized I wasn’t alone in the house.

The kitchen seemed to be a favorite spot for activity. With taps turning on spontaneously, cupboards opening by themselves, and the timer on the stove going off — sometimes in the middle of the night. My husband put a stop to that, somewhat forcefully, I didn’t mind.

One afternoon I was cleaning the stove when I felt as if I wasn’t alone. I turned to see a young girl around six years old. She had long, tussled hair. Her face was a little grubby and the yellow sun dress was obviously a worn favorite.

I said hello, thinking she was one of the neighbor’s children whom I haven’t met yet. She didn’t say anything, just turned and vanished. I never found out who she was and she wasn’t the first ghost in the house.

One evening, after I had put the boys to bed for the night, I had made myself a coffee and was looking forward to some alone time when I heard a scream, then another. Two little boys ran up the stairs faster than the speed of light. Once I got them calmed enough to tell me what was wrong, I found out that they had seen a man with a tall hat, dark clothes and no face come into their room and stand at the foot of their bed.

I ran downstairs expecting anything, but found nothing except a cold spot where the boys had seen the figure. They still talk about it eighteen years later.

The last incident happened when I had lay down for nap one afternoon, still recovering from a cold. I had just pulled the blanket up to my chest, hands folded over the hem of the blanket, and closed my eyes when a pair of long fingered hands, sharp nailed and heavily ringed, clasped my mine, squeezed then let go. I cried out, sat up in bed and expected to see someone standing by the bed. No one was there, but I did detect a faint scent of a flower of sort. I later recognized it as rose.

Shortly after that we bought a house in a nearby town and I was very happy to move. I never felt in danger but I was never a fan of that house.”

“When I was 7, my parents split up. My mother, two brothers, “bruncle” (an uncle that was like a brother) and myself all moved into an old farm house that family friends used as a summer home. The house was like one you’d read about in a book, well over 200 years old and it was beautiful. It was on its own private beach, an orchard and a fish pond. Sounds like it’s a dream, right? Wrong, it was a nightmare.

My mom has always been a part of the paranormal world. She’s communicated with ghosts and had “visions” but this house we all saw stuff.

It started in my room. The first few weeks I heard something by the bed in my room. I slept on the day bed across from the queen sized bed, the big bed was the scariest thing in the world to me. Every morning my mom would come in my room to wake me up and every toy I owned would be lined around the edge of the big bed. Then I would wake up to the bed torn apart then the bed would be packed up like it was freshly washed, every morning.

After that I moved into my brother Adam’s room so I wouldn’t have to sleep in a room alone. The first night I slept in there I heard whispering, so I told Adam to shut up. He was down stairs asleep on the couch with my mom. She was reading. I went to sleep ignoring the whispers.

That morning I saw scorched hand prints on the chimney pipe in the corner. I ended up in my mom’s room after that.

But strange things continued, like the cellar door open and shutting, lights flickering, and waking up to furniture and household items in different places. We started ignoring it.

Until that December the house had a wood stove with a glass door. I’d sit by it before bed to warm up but that night I saw a man in a big coat walking in the kitchen. I turned around and there was nobody there. When I woke up that morning there was a footprint on the inside of the glass, too big to be my mom’s or mine and too small to be my brother’s.

Recently my mother told me that she used to see a little girl sitting on the banister. My mom would blink or look away for a second then find one of my shirts and a pair of my pants in the same spot.

We asked the owners of the house. They got the house for less than 5 thousand dollars because the family who lived there all died in the house. The father killed his wife and himself, and one of the two daughters killed herself. The other is still suffering at 95 years old in a rest home in Dingwall, sweet woman.

“I lived in an old Victorian mansion (cliché, I know) on Powell Avenue in Ottawa. The very first night we moved in, my sisters and I felt something odd, as though we were being observed. The activity started slowly but surely, and increased incrementally every year we lived there. What we experienced daily in that house isn’t something I would have ever believed had I not lived through it.

While we never saw anything as dramatic as an apparition, we experienced just about everything else. Doors shutting and footsteps – always on the floor you weren’t on – were constant. Whenever someone was in the bath on the second floor, you’d hear a knock on the door but, of course, find no one when you opened it.

Many times I would walk into a room or hallway and feel like I was interrupting a conversation. The house had a sense of business about it, as though there were constantly people bustling around, even when it was empty. It was really freaky when the spirits started impersonating voices.

One time, my sister and father were in the kitchen. They heard my mother call my father’s name, as she often did when she wanted something, and without saying a word they migrated their conversation upstairs. I was sitting with my mom in the TV room, and we’d been talking the whole time, no one had called him.

One time in the deep winter, my sister and I were sitting in her room chatting, our parents were out of town and we were alone in the house. We heard footsteps upstairs, and suddenly they turned into LOUD dancing, as though someone was doing an incredibly forceful jig just above our heads. It went from one end of the house to the other, clear as day. It was almost like it was trying to upset us. We ended up running out into the street, we were so afraid.

Another time, I came home from school at lunch and was hurriedly trying to finish my homework before my next class. All of a sudden upstairs, although I was alone in the house, I heard doors slamming and someone running down the stairs. The noises were so loud and real that I freaked out and called my dad at work, who came home immediately to find me shaking on the front porch clutching my dog. He took a knife and searched the whole house for an intruder, but found nothing. A couple of months before we moved, he experienced the exact same thing when he was alone in the house.

It was odd that the spirits finally revealed themselves to him right before we moved, because he had never personally experienced anything in all the 10 years we lived there except in the final few months while we were packing up the house. I think they were upset that we were leaving.

We later found out that a family of women, a mother and two daughters, had lived in the house for decades and all of them died there. The wake for each was held in the living room. We don’t know if the spirits we encountered were them, but it makes sense that they would have been more timid to approach my father than they were approaching myself, my mother or my sisters.

A young family moved into the house after us, and I always wonder whether or not they’ve experienced similar events.

I am grateful that I never actually saw an apparition with my own eyes, but from what I experienced in that house, I can say categorically that ghosts are real and that there is something, whether an afterlife or maybe just another plane of energy, that lingers after death. I am not a religious person, so I find this knowledge oddly comforting.”